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Yes, before reading the article, I was going to suggest a book I recently read, but I see it's the rejected "the commonly held association" footnote 7 (Anthony,

Yes, before reading the article, I was going to suggest a book I recently read, but I see it's the rejected "the commonly held association" footnote 7 (Anthony, D. W. The Horse, the Wheel and Language), so this will be interesting to read closer.

adrian_b 5y ago
The association is only partially rejected in the paper. What the paper provides is a more detailed chronology and sequence of the events. A large part of the Indo-European expansion in Europe and Asia happened after 2200 BC, and that phase of the expansion was simultaneous with the spread of the domesticated horses and of the chariots with spoked wheels, as shown in the paper. It is very likely that in the areas where the Indo-Europeans arrived after 2200 BC, they were the first who brought there the horses and associated technologies. However, there was an earlier expansion of the Indo-Europeans, about a millennium earlier, and this new paper shows that the early expansion preceded the domesticated horses. It is likely that during this early phase the Indo-Europeans were distinguished from their neighbors by having an economy based mainly on raising cattle, which allowed them to be more mobile, even if not yet as mobile as later, when the use of horses was mastered. Also according to the paper, the use of horses and of spoked wheels appear to have originated in the Indo-Iranian branch, and then it spread from them to the other Indo-European branches, which were still in relative geographical proximity, and whose languages were not yet as differentiated as later, so mutual intelligibility probably still existed. This is consistent with the fact that the Hittites, in the second millenium BC, still had instruction manuals about horses which were written by speakers of an Indic language, from Mitanni.
- abrowne 5y ago
  The Mitanni was the one of the most interesting things to learn about in that book!

adrian_b 5y ago

The association is only partially rejected in the paper. What the paper provides is a more detailed chronology and sequence of the events. A large part of the Indo-European expansion in Europe and Asia happened after 2200 BC, and that phase of the expansion was simultaneous with the spread of the domesticated horses and of the chariots with spoked wheels, as shown in the paper. It is very likely that in the areas where the Indo-Europeans arrived after 2200 BC, they were the first who brought there the horses and associated technologies. However, there was an earlier expansion of the Indo-Europeans, about a millennium earlier, and this new paper shows that the early expansion preceded the domesticated horses. It is likely that during this early phase the Indo-Europeans were distinguished from their neighbors by having an economy based mainly on raising cattle, which allowed them to be more mobile, even if not yet as mobile as later, when the use of horses was mastered. Also according to the paper, the use of horses and of spoked wheels appear to have originated in the Indo-Iranian branch, and then it spread from them to the other Indo-European branches, which were still in relative geographical proximity, and whose languages were not yet as differentiated as later, so mutual intelligibility probably still existed. This is consistent with the fact that the Hittites, in the second millenium BC, still had instruction manuals about horses which were written by speakers of an Indic language, from Mitanni.

abrowne 5y ago
The Mitanni was the one of the most interesting things to learn about in that book!